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Illumina, Inc. ILMN

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The bet you're really making is that the world keeps reading more DNA every year, and that the labs doing it keep buying Illumina's machines and the chemistry kits those machines burn through on every run. Underneath that, you're betting the newest machine, the NovaSeq X, pulls enough labs onto its kits to grow again after four flat years, even with China now off-limits. Right now it is turning: the biggest revenue quarter in two years, up 9.4%, though reported profit fell because a year ago there was a one-time gain. You pay about 40 times last year's earnings, and on cash profits the stock costs less than in all but a quarter of the last twelve years.

Key data

Price$218.22
52-week range$88.00 - $231.81
P/E, TTM / FY28E40.7x / 31.1x
EV/EBITDA23.8x

ILMN · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$59$102$145$188$231 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Illumina sells DNA sequencers and, more importantly, the single-use flow cells and reagents those sequencers consume with every run. Razor and blades: the instrument sells once, the chemistry sells forever. It owns roughly 80% of high-throughput sequencing, and once a lab validates its assays on Illumina chemistry, ripping it out means re-validating everything, so the installed base is sticky. The flagship NovaSeq X, launched in 2023, drives the cost of a genome toward $200 and is the engine meant to pull labs onto higher-volume kits. Buyers are research universities, pharma, and clinical testing labs.

Two overhangs shape the story. GRAIL, the cancer-test acquisition Illumina was forced to unwind under antitrust orders, was spun off in 2024 and was the source of the billions in impairments that turned 2022 through 2024 into a bloodbath on the income statement; that is now behind it. And in 2025 China placed Illumina on its "unreliable entity list," closing a market that had been a high-single-digit slice of sales. In January 2026 it bought SomaLogic to push into proteomics.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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